Zooming in to knowledge

You know how quickly you can zoom into your house on Google Earth? Can you zoom into your organisational knowledge just as easily?

You can browse to your house very quickly on Google Earth.

• First you find your country, 
• then your city, 
• then your suburb or village
• then your street
• then your house. 

Sure, you can get there very quickly indeed if you know the postcode, but if you don’t know the code, you can still find your house by zooming in.

Can you find your way to knowledge just as quickly within your own knowledge base? If you don’t know the exact title of what you are looking for, can you zoom in and find it?

The “zooming in on Google Earth” analogy comes from an excellent blog post by Tomas Björkholm entitled Lean Documentation.  Tomas recommends six practices for really good, helpful knowledge transfer through documentation (in his case, documentation of IT systems);

• Practice 1 – Identify your consumers and their reasons for using the documentation (what we call “writing for the unknown user“)
• Practice 2 – Structure it like Google Earth – with each level linking to the next
• Practice 3 – Keep it small
• Practice 4 – Make the text inviting to read
• Practice 5 – Incorporate visuals
• Practice 6 – Make it easy to maintain

• The high level knowledge to give them a heads-up as an introduction to a topic 
• The medium level knowledge that maps out the things they need to address
• The detailed work guidance, which they will refer to as they progress with the activity
• Access to original documents, templates and/or people who can offer further advice, if the guidance turns out to have gaps in it.

Package knowledge in layers